A Weblog by One Humble Bookman on Topics of Interest to Discerning Readers, Including (Though Not Limited To) Science Fiction, Books, Random Thoughts, Fanciful Family Anecdotes, Publishing, Science Fiction, The Mating Habits of Extinct Waterfowl, The Secret Arts of Marketing, Other Books, Various Attempts at Humor, The Wonders of New Jersey, the Tedious Minutiae of a Boring Life, Science Fiction, No Accounting (For Taste), And Other Weighty Matters.

Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler has worked in book publishing for 25 years. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (for the SFBC and others), and then moved into marketing. He marketed books and other products for Wiley for eight years, and now works for Thomson Reuters. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year twice. He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Tuesday, February 07, 2012

I've come to believe, recently, that having each book I read have its own post here is the most efficient and convenient thing. I mean, it's definitely efficient and convenient for me, and my fervent hope is that it also helps the audience by making things easier to find (and for me to link to, later on).

Peanuts was funny and entertaining at this point, of course -- amusing and laugh-out-loud and wry by turns -- but it hadn't been surprising for nearly a decade, and most of its characters had first hardened into caricatures, and then into a collection of standard mannerisms. The Peanuts of 1981 was an utterly professional entertainment machine, and still the pure product of Charles Schulz's own pen and mind. But its pleasures in the '80s were like those of watching a late-season baseball game between two teams out of contention: it doesn't mean anything, and won't have any real effect on anything, but it's a quite agreeable way to spend a few hours.

If Schulz had been born later, or had a different temperament -- well, let's say it straight: if the world had been substantially different than it actually was -- then, maybe, he could have hung up the Peanuts hat, walked away from the massive pot of money Snoopy generated every year, and moved on to some new creation. No, honestly, that never would have happened; not in any plausible version of the past century. And even if it had, would whatever new thing the 58-year-old Schulz made been as interesting and fresh as what the 28-year-old Schulz had done? So that's just windy talk, and not worth pursuing.

What Schulz did was Peanuts, and he did it for a hair shy of fifty years. Not all of them are works of genius -- not all of anything by anyone is. And there are only occasional flashes of that genius here -- Sally's beanbag camp, a few moments with Peppermint Pattie -- but this is still an important part of the larger work that is Peanuts, and I'm happy to have it on my shelf.